


gotta stay with me

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s09e10 Road Trip, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 08:14:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean walks away and Sam wakes up in a meadow.</p>
<p>Takes place directly after 9x10: Road Trip</p>
            </blockquote>





	gotta stay with me

**Author's Note:**

> Right after I saw the episode, I sat down and wrote half of this that night. Then I forgot about it for a few days before deciding to finish it to put off doing homework!
> 
> Couldn't stop thinking about Sam's "i was ready to die"...

Maybe Dean should've seen it coming.

That's what Sam thought to himself in the dull, hazy minutes before, his one defence against the voice screaming in his head that this was going to kill Dean, that this was the worst thing he could ever do to his brother. But Sam had told him after the angel and Dean had seen it before the angel, when Sam had been speaking to Death himself. He'd been ready to follow Death and accept what came after. He'd wanted that.

So yeah, Dean should've seen it coming when he walked away from Sam that night.

In a way, Dean made the choice for him (and wasn't that the whole damn problem in the first place?). Sam watched his back become smaller with each step he put between them and Sam felt something in his gut shrivel up in defeat. Something in him sank to its knees and uncurled the fists at its sides. Tension releasing and a decision made.

He knew Cas could see it in his face when he turned to him, because Cas's own face twisted in response, his mouth turning suddenly down like a plane heading for a crash.

“Sam, this is not—”

“Please,” Sam said, cutting him off. He closed his eyes, his hand dropping from where it had risen in a half-formed gesture of silence. He could feel the phantom touch of hair on his fingertips, the sweaty cling of a forehead, could see the bright burst of light and a body dropping to the floor. Wasn't him.

This couldn't possibly be his skin. It hung around him like a homeless man's coat, tattered and borrowed and spit on.

“Don't.”

Cas dipped his head, nodding slightly at the ground. He looked wrong too, a new coat falling from his shoulders, the wrong colour, the wrong cut, but too similar to the one before for it to look like he knew the meaning of moving forward.

Sam used to know what that meant.

“Dean didn't mean for this to—”

“I know.”

****

Sam opened his eyes to light.

It was so bright that at first he couldn't see anything, but then a colour bled through the pure white: a clear, peerless blue.

Open sky.

He sat up, and the world turned to movement, tiny, white, dandelion fuzz swirling around him, catching and clinging to the edges of his hair. He shook his head and they spun away from his face, setting off with their seeds.

He was in a meadow and there were tiny pink flowers pushing up in the spaces between his fingers where his hands were planted on the ground. He was in a meadow and it was stretching out in front of him and he recognized it.

“Sammy!”

He whirled around, and there was Dean, all four and a half feet of him, Dad's too big clothing hanging off of his skinny, twelve-year old frame, his cheeks pink and a look of mock anger on his face.

“Dad told us not to run off too far!” he shouted, trotting up to where Sam was still sitting on the grass. There was a slight breeze and Sam could feel the touch of it on his face, warm and soft, could see its hand in the flap of Dean's shirt.

“But I wanna,” Sam said, the words coming easy to him. He remembered this, remembered Dad poring over maps of something in the kitchen of the new house they'd moved to and distractedly telling Sam and Dean that they could play outside as long as they didn't leave the backyard.

Sam had left the backyard pretty quickly. Wasn't very appealing to stay behind a fence when there was a meadow stretching off into the distance behind it.

Dean smiled and crouched down next to Sam.

“We can go as far as you want, Sammy,” he said conspiratorially. “You just gotta stay with me, 'kay?”

He held out his hand.

Sam looked down at it. His own hand now would dwarf this Dean's, but he remembered when Dean could wrap Sam's entire hand in his own, holding him safe and protected and leading him along. His throat felt thick, and there was safety in the thought that this Dean wasn't really seeing him, so he didn't bother trying to stop the burn in his eyes.

Sam took Dean's hand.

“Okay, Dean,” he said, and the words were barely distinguishable, wet and thin, but Dean smiled. Little pudgy cheeks and freckles all over, he smiled, Sam's soldier and shield.

“Let's go,” he said.

****

Sam didn't know quite how long he'd been in heaven for when it happened. Time moved strangely there, which he supposed was a blessing. If you were too aware of the passage of time, the monotony of living the same memories over and over again would grow torturous after a while.

He was sitting on the couch in an apartment that he used to call home, leaning against the left arm with Jess sprawled out on her stomach beside him, her astronomy textbook propped against his thigh. Her forehead was wrinkled in concentration as she read and he watched her, ignoring the book that he had been reading in his memory. His arm was resting on her back, thumb stroking in a slow circle across the knob of her shoulder blade. Her sweater was soft against his palm.

There was no sound to warn him. If the door opened, he didn't hear it. All he knew was that one minute he was tracing the shape of Jess's lips with his eyes, and then the next his gaze was drawn inexplicably upwards.

Dean was standing in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen, one hand pressed flat to the doorframe, the other slightly raised, like he was about to stretch it out towards Sam. It took Sam a second to realize what seeing him meant, since this wasn't a place where a memory version of Dean belonged. And even after he realized, he simply stared for a moment longer, unable to process, barely registering Jess sitting up and dislodging his arm, muttering something to her textbook.

And then Dean smiled, tiny and tremulous, and Sam's chest cracked open.

He surged up off the couch and reached Dean in two steps, hands hitting his shoulders and shoving, the anger of years and years of love behind his every movement. Dean crashed backwards into the kitchen and Sam slammed him against the counter, fisting his hands in the collar of Dean's shirt. He wanted to scream, wanted to shatter Dean with the strength of his voice, but when he tried to speak, he could only make the words come out in a whisper.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Dean's mouth twitched, like he couldn't keep that smile down, even with his spine bent back over the counter and his head crushed to the cupboards. His hands were on Sam too, patting, pressing over his torso and sliding up his back like Dean couldn't control them, like he needed to touch. Sam clenched his fists and shoved Dean back harder against the counter, a bitter, pointless satisfaction coursing through him when Dean winced.

“What do you think?” Dean said. “You just up and—left me, and you think I could've just not—”

“You left me!” Sam yelled, shaking Dean and rattling him against the cupboards. “You walked away just after I found out how much you'd been lying to me, how you shoved me back in this damn body with an angel—”

“I'm sorry, okay, I'm sorry!”

“That's not what you said then, you just turned and walked away!”

“I didn't know,” Dean said, his eyes wide and wild. “I didn't know you would do this.”

Sam leaned in closer, brought his face up to Dean's until he could feel his breath hot against his mouth.

“You should've known,” he hissed. “I pretty much told you I wanted to, and you still just left.”

With one more shove he let go and stumbled back from his brother. His hands felt cramped, unable to relax out of the fists they were curled into. Dean didn't move, still bent back into the counter, his chest heaving.

“Please just, just tell me you're here by some mojo of Cas's,” Sam said. “Or some sort of trick. You're not actually, you're not—”

Dean stared at him for a long moment before looking away. Sam watched the cords of his neck tighten, watched Dean open his mouth and then close it, his body slumping guiltily.

Sam wanted to ask someone how they had gotten here, how this had become who they were. But he didn't need to ask; he had a life's worth of memories that he could stroll through, memories of looking at Dean, watching him, running after him. They'd grown into each other like two trees planted too close together. You couldn't just cut down one.

Sam nodded and swallowed, his throat contracting dryly.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Get out.”

Dean blinked at him. Took a step forward.

“What?”

“You've got your own memories to look at,” Sam said tightly.

“Sammy—”

“Don't you—don't,” Sam said. “You don't get to just do this to yourself and expect me to be happy about it.”

“And isn't that hypocritical!” Dean roared. The sound was harsh in the quiet of the room, and Sam automatically glanced back into the living room. But Jess was still reading, unaware of anything going on in the kitchen. Of course, she wasn't really there at all. Only he and Dean were.

“It's not the same—”

“Yes, it fucking is,” Dean said. “I tried, okay, I tried to keep, keep—but I couldn't. Not with you gone. How could you do that. How could you.”

“Just go,” Sam said. He watched Dean jerk, and he knew that Dean remembered.

Sam could hear Jess talking happily to thin air in the living room. The memory had gone on without him. Dean nodded after a minute, defeated, and pushed by Sam to the door. He left the way he'd arrived, silently, and Sam let himself sink to the floor, spreading out on the tile.

Jess told him about the infinite range of gravity, how a star in another galaxy would still be able to feel the tiny amount of gravitational force he was making. Sam closed his eyes and cried.

****

“I was hoping it was just me.”

Dean didn't give any sign that he'd heard Sam at first, not his slow approach or his words. They were both in the meadow again, but it was Dean's memory this time; Sam could see the younger version of himself running around in circles not too far from where Dean was sitting, playing some sort of game.

Sam shuffled a few steps forward, drawing level with Dean, crushing pink flowers and dead dandelions under his feet. Dean was still staring straight ahead, his eyes narrowed against the sun and his face blank and hard. Sam couldn't tell whether he was looking into the distance or watching the younger version of himself.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Dean said at length.

“I hoped that you would be able to go on with me dead,” Sam replied. It was the first time he'd said that word in relation to himself, but it didn't hurt the way he thought it might; instead it simply felt right, settling in his chest. “You did when I fell into the cage. I hoped it was only me that couldn't do it without you.”

Dean was shaking his head before Sam was even done speaking.

“What are you talking about, you went and found a girl when I went to Purgatory, you didn't even look for me—”

“No, I didn't,” Sam interrupted. “You're right, I didn't look for you. I did what you did. Or I tried to.”

Dean tilted his head. Squinted off into the distance. The peals of a child's laughter could be heard echoing across the meadow.

“What are you talking about.”

“You succeeded,” Sam said. “That's why you're here. But I didn't get that far. I tried—was trying to—but then I hit a dog and I had to take him to the animal clinic and then they told me I had to take care of him and it just—it seemed like a sign. To keep going.”

Sam couldn't see Dean's face anymore. He'd raised his shoulders and ducked his head, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands laced behind his neck. His fingers were digging into the back of each hand, veins standing up in sharp relief, stretched tight like violin strings.

“And maybe it was, because I wouldn't have found you in heaven. You were in purgatory.”

“You tried to ki—” Dean's voice came out rough and flat, dead. He cleared it, a loud, violent sound, and spoke again.

“You tried to kill yourself back then?”

Sam didn't answer. The younger version of himself was running back towards the small house in the distance, their father's voice echoing across the meadow. For some reason the world didn't change around them, didn't shift to another memory, simply let them stay in the sunlit meadow, alone now.

“You should still be down there,” Sam said softly. His words felt weighed down, his voice filled with a heaviness he couldn't clear away. “You shouldn't have done this to follow me.”

Dean laughed, a bitter, sharp exhalation.

“But no matter what happened,” Sam said. “I guess we were always going to end up here.”

Dean jerked like he'd been shot and lurched to his feet. He stared at Sam across the small space between them, shaky and devastated.

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Sam.”

Both of them moved in the same second, fell forward into each other. Dean's arms were tight around his neck, clutching at him. Sam hadn't known that he was trembling until Dean touched him, but with his brother solid against him it was all he could feel, his own arms stuttering across Dean's back. He tucked his face into the side of Dean's throat and gathered great handfuls of leather jacket, trying to anchor himself, trying to calm down. Dean was holding him so tight that it felt like his bones were rearranging themselves, making space for Dean against him, inside him.

He tried to speak once, twice, three times, his mouth opening on Dean's skin, his breath making it damp and warm. His mind was blank, body acting on orders he wasn't consciously making, unable to do anything but try and bring Dean closer.

When Dean started to pull his head away Sam let out a wordless noise of protest, jerking him back. Their foreheads collided, faces sliding together.

“Fuck,” Dean said, soft and instinctive, and Sam closed his eyes and opened his mouth. Dean's lips were just barely touching his, skin catching and dragging so lightly that it could've been an accident. Could've been, should've been.

“Sammy?” Dean asked, the word slurred between their mouths. They rocked back and forth on the spot, sunlight and dandelion fuzz all around them. “Sammy, it's you, right?”

He sounded childish and small, and Sam nodded again and again, and somewhere between one second and the next Dean shifted and it became a kiss for real, deep and wet and inevitable.

Dean ate at his mouth and moved against him like he wanted to consume Sam, take him over, and Sam opened up for it, didn't even try to swallow the sounds being pulled out of him. Of course, he thought wildly. Of course this would be where they would finally be able to do this, because this was the only place where they could be honest with each other. There was nothing more honest than the way Dean kissed.

Pink flowers were smashed under their feet and the sunlight was starting to go golden and thick around them, shadows lengthening. Dean pulled away, his hands cupping Sam's face and holding him there as he looked at him. He was so much older than the boy Sam remembered matching this meadow, but his eyes were just as bright. Sam was the taller one now, but he still felt like he was looking up at Dean.

“We can go as far as you want, Sammy,” Dean said, a smile growing on his face like a spark to a fire. “You just gotta stay with me, 'kay?”

“Okay, Dean,” Sam said. “Okay.”


End file.
